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Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Ambitious Project

Yesterday I began the rather ambitious project of transcribing the newspapers of Alexandria found in the Alexandria-Monroe Public Library. The history room has the Alexandria Times-Tribune starting with March 1, 1905. The Times began in 1885 and merged with the Tribune (began in 1898) in 1903 to become the Times-Tribune. Most of my maternal ancestry was in the Alexandria area at that time, and my hope is that by embarking on this project I will discover new data about my family.

Alexandria was a booming place in those early days due to the discovery of natural gas. The town was settled in 1836. By 1890, the population was only 715 but by 1900 the population had grown to 7,221, of which 1005 were foreign born, according to the 1910 Encyclopedia Britannica. Population growth of over 700 percent was a direct result of the numerous factories that at one time existed in the area.

I will be posting the articles that I transcribe to the INMADISO-L mailing list at Rootsweb. This is a mailing list dedicated to those seeking information about their families from Madison County, Indiana. The activity on the list has been rather slow lately, but hopefully my postings will not only help another researcher but also stimulate discussion traffic on the list.

At another county mailing list I subscribe to a similar project there by an individual has greatly increased the knowledge of the county and its people and has helped my research. My goal is to be able to give someone else a clue or a nugget as I do my own digging.

My goal is to try to work on this at least one lunch hour per week and see how that goes.